by Dana Haynes
She froze.
Dee was Daria.
Jean D’Arc was Joan of Arc.
Translation: Daria … you are burned.
It was an old code. Far older than her time with Shin-Bet. It was a code from her childhood.
Her first assumption was she was being followed. If so, then the surveillance team was good because she hadn’t spotted them yet. Shaking them would be a good idea. Just on principle. Step one: thin the herd.
She gave up on the notion of collecting her luggage from baggage claim. The bag contained nothing she couldn’t replace. In fact, if push came to shots-fired, Daria could ghost out of her own life, just like she’d been trained to do since before she’d hit five feet tall.
She stopped in the women’s restroom, waited a few minutes in a cubicle, then stepped out and returned to the news kiosk. She spotted a businessman with a carry-on bag eyeing a rack of magazines. Daria had a copy of that week’s Time magazine in her tote. She pulled it out, caught the man’s eye. “Excuse me?”
She gave him her brightest smile. He glanced over, turned away, then did a double take. Beautiful women didn’t smile like that at him every day.
Daria proffered her magazine. “I’m done with this one and I hate to just throw them away. Do you want it?”
The guy had been looking for Field and Stream or Golf Digest, but free is free. “Sure! Thanks.”
Daria had noted his wedding ring before she approached him. She winked at him. Predictably, the wink made him glance around, to see who else had noticed.
“Business or pleasure?”
“Excuse me? Oh, my flight. Ah, I’m … I’ve got a business thing. In Atlanta.” He shrugged. “Conference.”
“Lovely. Well, bon voyage.”
He gestured toward the magazine. “Thanks. Um, hey, you know, thanks. Bye.”
Daria felt just a little bad that she was so good at flustering married men.
* * *
A janitor in a jumpsuit, with a water bucket and mop, touched the comm unit in his ear. “Batsman just made contact. Unknown male. She handed him a magazine. He’s glancing around, looking for surveillance? He hasn’t made me. He’s putting it in his carry-on. Over.”
The CIA agent running the surveillance team toggled back. “Stick with the stranger. See where he goes. If there’s a chance to grab the magazine, do so. Over.”
“Confirmed.”
Two members of the CIA surveillance team peeled away.
* * *
Daria left JFK without approaching the baggage carousel. It took her three cabs, a brisk walk, and a short subway ride before she found the perfect place to stop. The convergence of a convenience store, a small restaurant, and a construction project that had closed one of two traffic lanes, and a harried-looking police officer, bundled against the cold and trying to keep the sluggish traffic moving.
She located an ATM machine and dug through her tote for her collection of debit cards, which nestled beneath the removable cardboard bottom of the bag near the spade-shaped knife. She never traveled without them and never trusted them to her checked luggage. Each card featured a different name and different alphanumeric password, and each was linked to a different bank. She pulled a total of twelve hundred dollars out of the three accounts.
She dashed to the convenience store and found a large, cheap pair of sunglasses and a folding map of Manhattan. She headed to the restaurant and ordered French onion soup with warm corn bread and coffee latte. She chose a table where she could watch the irritable traffic cop standing between orange traffic cones, mouthing, “C’mon buddy … move it … let’s go…”
She ate without noticing the quality of the food. She studied the map. Colin Bennett-Smith had asked her to meet him at 2:00 P.M. on Forty-second Street, west of Lexington, at an entrance to Grand Central Terminal that hunkered beneath the Park Avenue overpass. She ran a trimmed, buffed fingernail over the spot, realizing she recognized it. There would be plenty of foot traffic and plenty of automobile traffic. It wasn’t a half-bad place for an impromptu meeting.
Except for the warning at the airport.
She glanced up at the traffic from time to time. The block provided virtually no parking and with construction slowing everything to a snail’s pace, it became unlikely she was being followed by a car that was circling the block. The irritated traffic cop would have noticed by now. And no customers younger than sixty had entered the restaurant since she arrived.
Adjacent to the Grand Central entrance that Bennett-Smith had indicated stood the H-shaped Grand Hyatt Hotel.
Daria paid cash for her food and carefully refolded her map. Outside the restaurant, she hailed a cab. “Fifty-first and Park, please.”
She climbed out at Saint Bart’s church and sauntered over to Lexington, pretending to talk on her cell phone, her wrist and forearm, along with the new sunglasses, in the line of sight between passing cars and her face. She took a quick right into the open-air market that led to Grand Central. The tunnel also featured a side entrance into the Hyatt. She paused over the produce bins for three minutes, watching through the smoked lenses for foot surveillance.
Satisfied, she dashed into the hotel lobby. It was packed with visitors and staff. She strode up to the concierge’s desk and, in her best midwestern accent, asked, “Hi! Can you tell me where the registration is for the convention?”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Daria wore a stick-on name tag with a generically American name, plus a swag bag from an association of Midwestern insurance companies. As a translator, she had attended a dozen of these events and knew that half of the swag bags get thrown out almost unopened. And extra name tags were kept around for attendees who had not registered in advance.
Daria strode into the hotel’s mezzanine-level bar. It offered an extended view of 42nd Street. She scouted out the scene.
It looked cold outside. She hadn’t packed a coat for her trip from Los Angeles to Costa Rica—who would?
In her mind, she didn’t think from home to Costa Rica … her kind didn’t have a home. Homes are a luxury for noncombatants.
She had two hours to kill before the meet. She ordered white wine that she ignored, sat and watched the street for forty minutes. Whenever someone walked past her, she held her inert mobile phone to her ear and said, “Um-hm … yes…”
She saw nothing outside in the crowded street that made her nervous. Most of midtown was festooned in red and green, with holly and elves and silver bells and all the rest of the retail kitsch that annually invades every city in America like festive kudzu. The sun etched the sky, white with pollution.
Dee Jean D’Arc …
Daria, you are burned.
It seemed someone was watching her. And someone else was watching out for her.
In both cases, she didn’t know who.
She unfolded her Manhattan map again, studied it for a few moments, then left the bar and returned to the concierge. She pointed to a spot on the map. He grimaced. “Very bad traffic, ma’am. Avoid it if you can.”
She thanked him kindly and asked if there was a computer she might use. He pointed her to the hotel’s business center. There, she did a MapQuest search of the coordinates she had shown the concierge.
Daria found an X, where Broadway intersects Seventy-second Street on the Upper West Side. There was a small park and a subway stop. In the vicinity was a sandwich shop, a chain bookstore that also housed a coffee shop, a bank, a women’s clothing store, and a photocopy shop.
Perfect. She returned to the second-floor window of the hotel and activated her cell phone.
* * *
Most CIA operations can be run from high-tech, high-def wired operations rooms burrowed deep in the bowels of the headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The ops rooms are known as Shark Tanks. Each operations room was as secure as Fort Knox, featuring more high-definition wiring than a Super Bowl game.
But when an operation comes together too quickly for a traditional setup, mobile c
ommand centers become the focal point of the operation. There were few enemies of America who could hope to outmaneuver the sheer calculating power and communication technology of a CIA command vehicle.
Such vehicles—long truck-and-trailer rigs—are prepositioned around the globe. Each serves as a mobile ops room, complete with the latest in wireless surveillance equipment, GPS-fed monitoring stations, real-time data feeds to Langley, and enough weaponry and defensive technology to face off against a small army.
Such command vehicles are rarely used within the borders of the United States because, as any intelligence analyst, lawmaker, or journalist can tell you, the CIA does not operate domestically.
At least, not officially.
* * *
Owen Cain Thorson and two tech-savvy agents occupied one of these long, white trucks, marked on the outside with the stylized logo of a Hollywood film crew. They had parked on Forty-second Street, a half block from the meet. Earlier in the day, Thorson’s techs had positioned eight cameras, no larger than lipsticks, at strategic locations on every side of the block, both at ground level and on upper floors of the surrounding buildings. Eight small monitors in the truck were being fed live images.
Thorson removed his ear jack and voice wand, and reached for a walkie-talkie. “Goddard? What was Batsman wearing when you lost her? Over.”
“Ah, black leather jacket, jeans, flats, red button-down blouse. Oh, and her hair is longer than in the briefing photos. Shoulder-length. Straight. Over.”
Thorson acknowledged the transmission. One of the agents in the truck grumbled, “I can’t believe Goddard’s team lost her at JFK.”
“We weren’t there.” Thorson turned his eyes back to the monitors, which showed strategic intersections and sidewalks within a two-block-by-two-block radius. “Don’t second-guess his team. She’s a trained spook. Maybe she made them. Maybe she assumes she’s always under surveillance and takes countermeasures. Look, study this.”
He produced a file folder, about a half-inch thick. “Backgrounders for both the Syrian shooter and this Gibron woman. We put the team together so fast, I didn’t have time to brief everyone.”
He handed the folder to the nearest agent.
* * *
Daria’s Manhattan meeting place was under surveillance by the CIA.
Both Daria and the CIA team, in turn, were under surveillance by Asher Sahar and his crew. After all, the whole event had been orchestrated by Asher. He had no intention of missing the show.
His procurement specialists—completely separated from his tactical field specialists—had provided a third-floor storage space above a diamond store. The space was remarkably low-tech despite its content: eight-foot-tall wooden chests of drawers, the drawers all uniformly four inches wide by three inches deep, all filled with velvet-lined boxes of diamonds and other gems. Upon reviewing the space, weeks earlier, Asher and Eli Schullman had come to the conclusion that the only security was a sign on the door that read NO ADMITTANCE!
Three wood-framed windows looked out on Forty-second. Schullman had coated the inside of the windows with static-hold sheets, adhered them with blasts from a hair dryer. The sheets reduced lens flare from the cameras and rifles inside the diamond exchange.
Asher’s surveillance experts—a cell of good people, well isolated from procurement and tactical—had provided wide-spectrum receivers to monitor the CIA teams. The guys in surveillance had bought the CIA frequencies from the Russian FSB. Strange bedfellows …
Asher, Eli Schullman, and two others manned the third floor of the diamond exchange. Two more men waited below them in a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a well-faked handicapped parking permit.
Asher pushed his eyeglasses up into his thinning hair and raised binoculars, adjusted them. “Timing for Belhadj?”
One of his men, an Ethiopian Jew, checked his handheld. “We assumed he’d come into Penn Station but he switched trains. He should reach Grand Central Station inside the hour.”
“Terminal,” Asher whispered, making minute adjustments to the binoculars. “Grand Central Terminal.”
Schullman rubbed his Cro-Magnon jaw. “And Gibron?”
Asher clucked his tongue. “I’m sure she’s around.”
* * *
In the CIA truck-and-trailer, one of the techs, a taciturn Texan, spun from his monitor and deftly doffed his headset. “Got her! She’s calling the FBI!”
“Block it!” Thorson rose from his bolted-down seat.
* * *
At the Los Angeles Field Office of the FBI, Ray Calabrese glanced down at his cell phone, which sat atop a pile of files. The phone rang once. He reached for it, but it didn’t ring again.
Odd.
As he pulled his hand away, Special Agent in Charge Henry Deits knocked on his door. He held his laptop, propped open, cradled like an infant.
“Have you checked the dailies from the CIA yet?”
Ray leaned back in his chair. “No. They got something good?”
Henry looked more pale than usual, which was saying something. “Something, yeah. Not something good.”
He stepped into the room and showed Ray his laptop, with the twin photos of Khalid Belhadj and Daria Gibron.
* * *
The Texan in the CIA command vehicle redirected Daria’s call away from Ray Calabrese’s cell phone. Thorson’s crew and those back home in the Langley Shark Tank listened to the recorded intro they had pirated from Ray’s cell earlier that day. “Hi, it’s Ray. I’m on another line. Please leave me a message.” Beep.
The three men in the long, technology-laden mobile ops center kept quiet, doffing their own headsets. The truck included an interior door that led to the cab but no driver sat up there. Nothing looks more like surveillance than a driver behind the wheel of an unmoving truck.
After a couple of clicks, a voice rang through the speakers inside the truck. Thorson grabbed a pen and a notepad.
“Ray?” The voice was digitally recorded on no fewer than three devices; a backup for the backup, as well as a device back at the Shark Tank beneath Langley. “Hallo. It’s Daria. I’m in New York, believe it or not.”
The Texan studied his monitors. “She’s bouncing off a cell tower within a mile of here.”
Daria sounded cheerful. “I wanted you to know, an old friend, Colin Bennett-Smith, is in town. He was MI-6 but washed out. I told you about him…”
Another CIA agent quickly jotted down the name. “Bennett-Smith?”
Owen shushed him. He was not surprised a trained spy was using a code name for the Syrian assassin over a cell phone.
“Anyway, he wants to meet me. Don’t know why. He set a meeting at two, at Forty-second and Park Avenue, in midtown. He said it was Life and Death. That means he’s using his old codes. We’re really meeting at four o’clock at some place called Verdi Square. I’ve never heard of it.”
Owen Thorson no longer was seated.
“I wanted you to know, in case this ends up being something the FBI wants in on. So, anyway. Miss you. Take care. Bye.”
The line disconnected.
“Shit!” one of the agents barked.
“It’s okay,” Owen said, catching the attention of everyone: The men in the truck, the cadre of agents on the streets and rooftops, and the people back in the Operations Room at Langley. He adjusted his voice wand. “All teams: The meet isn’t happening here. We are mobile. Repeat: we are mobile! Verdi Square: Where is it?”
The third man in the truck rifled through a Thomas Guide. “Ah … got it! Seventy-second and Broadway!”
Thorson pointed toward the door to the empty cab. “Drive.”
* * *
At CIA headquarters in Langley, a dozen agents monitored the communications. Eight large, flat monitors caught the images from the eight CC cameras set up around the rendezvous site. One was Nanette Sylvestri, a tall African American woman a few years past sixty. John Broom stood next to her with his ubiquitous coffee cup, watching the flat-screens.
H
e had all but begged to be allowed in the field for this one, given his knowledge of Batsman. He’d literally written the book on Daria Gibron. Owen Cain Thorson had declined. “You’re Analysis, not Ops. Besides, you’ll have a different perspective if you’re seeing real-time intelligence from home. You might see something I don’t.”
Now, John listened to the pirated transmission. He had studied Daria Gibron but had never heard her voice. It was pitched lower than he’d imagined. He tagged her Middle Eastern accent but it was spiced with something else. Not just dulled by her years living in America, the woman’s voice had picked up a ragout of dialects from the many languages she spoke. John thought that Daria Gibron sounded like the future. Like a world without countries.
As Thorson galvanized his Manhattan team, John froze with a coffee halfway to his lips.
“The hell…?” he whispered.
* * *
Asher Sahar’s team in the diamond exchange and the men in the Grand Cherokee overhead Daria’s whole message, as well as the site-to-site chatter from the CIA.
Eli Schullman threw off his foam headset. “What the fuck is this about a code? What goddamn code?”
Asher Sahar took a step back from the third-floor window and lowered his binoculars. His eyes darted the length of Forty-second Street. His anxiety level spiked. None of the other men could tell, but Eli Schullman had been his friend for years.
“What?”
Asher continued scanning the street.
“Asher? You didn’t expect her to show?”
Asher ignored the big man.
Their radio chirped and one of the men sitting below them in the Jeep Grand Cherokee swore in English. The man was a Bosnian Croat mercenary from the Neretva Canton of Herzegovina. “Base: this is fucked! What are your orders?”
Asher set down the binoculars and turned to their communications man. “We need to redirect the Syrian, please. He’s going to the wrong site.”
The second man in the Grand Cherokee shouted into his mic. “He’ll be suspicious. He won’t—”